MRS. BIGGS

Why is art education so important to our school system and the future of America's children?

           Art education is essential to the future of our children in America. The visual, musical, chorographical, and theatrical arts provide young students with creative abilities, critical thinking skills, understanding of tolerance, and academic performance improvement of other subjects in school. Art education provide our youth an outlet for being open-minded, experimental in self-expression, individuality, and teaches them that problems in life can be solved in many different ways. Finally, the arts can attract and enlist the child who is not being reached in other subjects, being ostracized by other peers, or seems like giving up on school all together. The arts offers a positive outlet to express themselves, feel comfortable in their own skin, and provides an affective healthy psychological experience for all human beings.

            The arts provide an opportunity to reach children of all cultures, races, socioeconomic backgrounds, and academic levels, as well as, instilling diverse community values through a social action curriculum. We as educators need to empower our students with positive self-esteem, meaningful reflection, critical thinking skills, and personal motivation to task problem solving. Art educators have the ability to provide our youth with a cultural and personal safe haven to express their inner thoughts and imagination. Our schools today are filled with a vast melting pot of diverse children who come from many different backgrounds and the arts is a subject that can openly discuss and allow freedom of expressing who they are without feeling scared of rejection by others.

            In closing, any involvement to the arts is a positive building block in our student's educational portfolio. It is proven that children who are exposed to the arts score better in other subjects, read better, understand higher reasoning, and are generally more motivated to in classes and other areas of their life. The arts help to create a learning environment that fosters creativity, innovation, community involvement, and overall a well-rounded education. One amazing effect is that student artwork beautifies the actual school itself and creates a powerful positive self-esteem for the entire school body. It is the arts that has inspired so much that is beautiful in life and will continue to be an essential and critical part of teaching our youth today. Just think, without the arts we would not have ballet, opera, Sesame Street, Beethoven, The Mona Lisa, the Eiffel Tower, Broadway, The Scream, Dr. Seuss, Billie Holliday, Graffiti art, Andy Warhol, cartoons, video games, movies, music, etc.